Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [248]
Frank O’Connor died on November 7, 1979. Rand asked Evva Pryor, an attentive young associate at her lawyers’ office, to help arrange a memorial service in the city and choose a gravesite in the countryside. At the service, held in the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, she sat silently, apparently exercising steely self-control, while dozens of old acquaintances and former students filed past, offering condolences. Later, she, Leonard, and a small group of Leonard’s friends drove to the nonsectarian Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. David Kelley, a student of Leonard’s (whom Leonard, later a philosophy professor at Vassar, excommunicated), read “When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted” by Rudyard Kipling, a writer from the heroic age of Ayn’s and Frank’s childhoods. Then she watched as her husband was lowered into the ground, beside an empty plot she had purchased for herself. She had heard that long-married couples often die within months of each other. “I won’t have to suffer long,” she told one of Leonard’s friends. Her fellow exile and favorite composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff, lay in a grave nearby.
Although the last three years of Ayn Rand’s life were scored with private sadness and ill health, they were not entirely lacking in contentment. Perhaps her happiest moments took place when she was able to reminisce about Frank with Peikoff or Huggins, who was her closest companion after her husband’s death. She spoke often with Frank’s niece Mimi Sutton and begged Mimi to call collect and tell her family stories about his boyhood and young manhood. “‘Mimi, talk to me about Frank,’ she would say. ‘Tell me everything you can remember.’ I feared she would commit suicide,” Mimi reflected. “Every time I called, she was alone.” At first, her days were blank with bewilderment and loss. Slowly, she revived. She began to take antidepressant medication. Leonard introduced her to his student Cynthia Pastor. Together, the two women tackled the stacks of letters, bills, and invitations that had gone unattended, and Rand began to receive visitors again. Evva Pryor came to play Scrabble once a week. Alan Greenspan stopped in to see her when he was in New York. She occasionally spoke to George Reisman, Murray Rothbard’s onetime crony, who was teaching Austrian-school economics at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, and she grew close to Reisman’s romantic partner, Edith Packer, a psychologist and Objectivist stalwart who lived in New York.
With encouragement from Eloise, she began to take short walks, sometimes in street clothes and sometimes in a housedress and slippers. A neighborhood rental agent who knew her encountered the women walking and had to look twice at Rand, who was almost unrecognizable in a shabby dress and a babushka. “She looked like a poor old Russian woman,” said the agent, Roberta Satro.
She watched reruns of a 1960s television series called The Rat Patrol and developed a crush on a German-American actor named Hans Gudegast. Straight and slender, with European manners and an aristocratic bearing, Gudegast, also known as Eric Braeden, struck her as a living representation of Francisco d’Anconia. He “look[ed] like Cyrus,” observed an acquaintance of the time who later saw reproductions of the original 1914 drawings of Cyrus and his rescuers. With the actor as her inspiration, she began to compose her own script for a miniseries of Atlas Shrugged.
An ex-NBI student named Kathryn Eickhoff, a vice-president of Greenspan’s former Wall Street consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan, paid regular visits to counsel her about her finances. Eickhoff tried to disguise her dismay when Rand revealed that all her money was in a savings bank across the street from the